On the voter suppression issue, in a real way we did let him. This is hardly the first time in recent memory that the GOP has done this and yet we did pretty much nothing to stop it from happening again. If we don’t do something this time the GOP will, without a doubt, do it again and keep on doing it until they actually successfully steal a presidential election.

Some folks need to go to jail. Ohio’s Secretary of State needs to lose his job. I’m not sure what needs to be done about f’ing Florida, but something surely does. All that needs to happen well in advance of the 2014 election season. Clearly none of that is going to happen if people don’t push for it.

We also need to be pushing to change the way redistricting is done. It’s not like gerrymandering is new. It’s also not like no one has figured out how to manage the problem. We just haven’t pushed hard enough to make it happen. It needs to be nonpartisan and organized around creating sensible districts, not safe seats.

There are a lot of people who believe that it is more important that the public thinks that they can trust the voting process than it is that the voting process actually be trustworthy.

If you think that, it is more important to hold fast to the position that vote stealing is limited to isolated incidents, a few bad apples that were all quickly caught and corrected, rather than a systemic problem. Because if there were a systemic problem, then we would have to admit that we have no clue who the fuck should be running the country. And most people could not cope with that.

This is exactly the thinking that goes into the security of electronic voting machines: it’s more important that they can’t be *shown to be fallible* (by letting independent experts audit the code, or with extensive paper trails) than that they actually be secure (This view is easier to understand if you start out by believeing that it’s actually impossible for any system to be perfectly secure; if flaws will exist either way, it’s better that we maintain the illusion that the election won’t be stolen than that we cop to the fact that the election will TOTES BE STOLEN AND THERE’S NOTHING WE CAN DO ABOUT IT)

(A similar thing is the fundamental principle of the TSA. For the TSA to appear to be effective, they would need to first show us that we were, in fact, in terrible danger all the time and only through their vigilence did planes not crash into buildings daily. And if you believed that the TSA actually *was* thwarting hundreds of terror attacks every year, would YOU ever get within a hundred miles of an airplane?)

Lori

Hiding out until the next LB thread. He didn’t feel that post-election conversation with us would be productive, regardless of who won. Which, from his perspective, is no doubt true. His guy lost and his party is now legislatively irrelevant in the state in which he lives.

His reasons for voting for Romney are too sensitive and super secret to share with the class, so he might have been happy about some of the other election outcomes. Or he might be off crying in his beverage of choice because all is gloom and misery.

Lori

It wasn’t right of Romney to stiff the people who’d been pulling for him, though.

No, it wasn’t. That was my point. It’s one thing for him to treat the commoners he doesn’t know like crap. Romney’s supporters seem to see that as a plus. The fact that he would treat the people who worked so hard for him that way ought to be a wake up call even for the folks too dumb or too dead inside to have been bothered by the 47% comment.

I mean, no matter how repellent the dude is the campaign folks were
working for, the fact is they were collecting a paycheck like all of us
do, and Romney’s attitude about them is like a self-centered CEO’s on
steroids.

A fact which should have been obvious to them long before election night. You don’t get a lot of credit from me for only noticing that a man is a mean-spirited, selfish, greedy SOB when he turns on you.

They didn’t deserve to be tossed aside like so much trash without even a
couple days’ grace to have one last blowout and then turn in the
campaign cards. :(

We’ll have to agree to disagree on this one (see: above)

So yeah, I feel sorry for them. ‘Cause the fish rots from the head.

I don’t. Because this fish head was rotten before they signed on to be it’s guts.

Or
nobody’s had enough time to double-check the NSA guy’s data and
analysis. Which is where my money is, since it hasn’t been all that long
since he published.

Fair enough. I’ve been seeing the claim that votes are being systematically stolen by the Republican party for at least eight years now, but it’s certainly possible that only now is it being made with compelling evidence which is too recent to have yet been acted on.

There are a lot of people who believe that it is more important that
the public thinks that they can trust the voting process than it is that
the voting process actually be trustworthy.

Fair enough… but are there really a lot of people who think public confidence in the voting process is so important that they are willing to lose their jobs rather than challenge an untrustworthy process? I can’t decide whether I think that’s admirably civic-minded or mind-numbingly wrongheaded. Both, perhaps.

Jessica_R

Ha! I just posted a link to that in another read then saw this post. Yeesh. The really sad thing is I don’t think even W would have done that. I think he would have given a 24-48 hour heads up at least. Hell, I can even see him saying “Fuck it, go nuts this weekend and turn them in on Monday, not my problem anymore.”

From what I’ve seen, it seems more likely that the choice would be between challenging and keeping jobs, rather than between challenging and losing jobs.

Jessica_R

And yeah I’m with Lori. It’s like the White People Mourning Romney Tumblr. I should be a bigger person but Romney’s staffers are people who apparently have no problem with defunding Planned Parenthood, think it’s outrageous some people have an expectation to eat, are happy to keep gay people second class citizens, and cosign Paul Ryan’s hideous “budget”. You lie down with a snake don’t get outraged when you get bit, and hard.

It seems to me that if I believe that the Democratic Party has compelling evidence that the Republican Party is engaging in voter fraud to steal elections, and they are choosing to remain silent in order to preserve voter confidence in the system, it follows that Democratic politicians are willingly choosing to lose their jobs rather than challenge the system.

How do you see it?

Greenygal

The original source for the credit card thing also offers up this gem, talking about the day afterwards: “Ann Romney’s remarks brought several staffers to tears as she told the
assembled group that they would always be part of the fabric of the
Romney family.”

Ursula L

I wonder what Obama’s margin of victory would have been had this election contained no vote theft, no voter suppression, and election spending within reasonable amounts. Also what Congress would look like.

Going by Nate Silver’s numbers, pretty much what it was.

The various voter suppression laws and efforts had the potential to suppress votes. They did not have the potential to skew poll numbers. When the two are in alignment we can be confident that any efforts to thwart the process are not statistically significant.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t worry about efforts to suppress the vote, or make voting difficult, or skew the process.

Voting shouldn’t be made any more difficult than necessary.

But, even when voting is made more difficult than necessary, the fact that the people in line in Florida stuck it out and voted anyways shows us that people will make the effort to vote even when it is difficult.

And I really want to send the poll workers at my voting station, and others in my area, down to Florida two years from now, because I got to the polling station around 6 pm, and overheard one of them commenting that this was the busy time, as people were voting after work. And I was in and out in less than half an hour, voting on a paper ballot that was electronically scanned. This doesn’t have to be a long or difficult process.

My voting experience:

Go to my polling station.

Table 1, to find which of the four districts that this station serves I was in, so I could go to the right table. A poll worker at that table, to help if needed, with a list of addresses for each district. No line.

Table 2. Two workers here, the first to look people up in the voter registry book, the second to tear a paper ballot out of a book and give the first the number on the stub left behind to record on the registry (the number is not on the ballot, so it is anonymous when used.) A short line, five or so people in front of me, but the married couples using the same last name were looked up together in the book, which is alphabetically organized, and this saved time.

Table 3. Four large tables, with dividers, where eight people can fill out their ballots at once. I don’t like this, it is not as private as the old mechanical voting booths were, with their curtains. There is one older couple where the husband seems to be disabled, and his wife is helping him, and no one seems to think to intervene to ensure his control of his vote.

Table 4. Wait to have my ballot scanned. 3 people in front of me in line.

****

Going by what I saw, the threat to free voting is not from the voting process. It’s a domestic threat – a spouse “helping” the other, and people accepting it as natural that this sort of “help” takes place. I don’t know, for the couple I saw, whether or not the “helping” spouse was influencing the vote of the person they were “helping.” I do know that this shouldn’t be an issue.

But this is the same problem we see with the shift towards voting by mail and routine use of absentee ballots in non-absentee situations. When a ballot is mailed to someone’s home, it is no longer secret. Any abuse or coercion within the home now controls the voting process. And other people, such as employers, have the possibility to demand to see ballots, and to coerce people in how those ballots are filled out.

Lori

Ann just didn’t mention that it was the part of the fabric used to diaper the family’s many offspring and to cover the bed of the family dogs.

So she was lulling them into a false sense of security, as well? Nice team those two make. Ann’s like the lying, inept manager who lies to the employees’ faces while Romney’s the CEO giggling about having security escort them all out on a Friday so they can’t make a scene. And of course the huge fat bonus check he just hauled down for himself after ruining fifty Christmases in one go.

EllieMurasaki

Fifty? You think small, don’t you?

Lori

But, even when voting is made more difficult than necessary, the fact
that the people in line in Florida stuck it out and voted anyways shows
us that people will make the effort to vote even when it is difficult.

I have nothing but respect for the people who stood in those horrible lines in Florida, but I’m not sure we should over-generalize. I think what the Florida situation showed is that people will stand in line to vote when they perceive that someone is making the situation difficult in order to deliberately prevent them from voting. This year the GOP stopped even trying to pretend that they weren’t attempting to suppress the vote and it ticked people off. If the GOP had been more subtle I think past history shows that they could have gotten a lot more people to go home.

Oh, I was thinking of people working for the voting machine companies, Ohio SoS, liaisons between candidates & those others, and the like. The ones who would actually have to know, if there were anything going on. It’s all too easy to imagine Democrats having no evidence even if there were plenty of hanky-panky going on. (And yes, go too far down that road, and you end up in Conspiracy Theory Land.)

EllieMurasaki

I am given to understand that it is harder to jailbreak an iPhone than to hack an electronic voting machine. It is entirely possible that voting machines got hacked and absolutely no one except the hackers know about it.

Jessica_R

When he said she would have made a great first lady in his concession speech, I thought to myself I had a dollar for viewer who also said “no she wouldn’t” out loud I could buy a yacht of my own.

Ursula L

I have nothing but respect for the people who stood in those horrible lines in Florida, but I’m not sure we should over-generalize. I think what the Florida situation showed is that people will stand in line to vote when they perceive that someone is making the situation difficult in order to deliberately prevent them from voting. This year the GOP stopped even trying to pretend that they weren’t attempting to suppress the vote and it ticked people off. If the GOP had been more subtle I think past history shows that they could have gotten a lot more people to go home.

Of course.

My point was that we have an objective way to judge whether the election is being stolen by suppressed or coerced votes. We can compare the best possible statistical analysis of polls to what actually happened.

And when we do that, it tells us that, despite efforts to suppress the vote and disqualify legal voters, it didn’t happen.

We still need to put an end to efforts to suppress voting.

But we don’t have to be paranoid about this particular election’s results in order to see the need to make the voting process better.

I’m re-reading Huckleberry Finn at the moment, because the books I’m supposed to be reading are making my head to hurt, and last night I read Pap Finn’s rant against the government:

“Call this a govment! why, just look at it and see what it’s like.
Here’s the law a-standing ready to take a man’s son away from him–a
man’s own son, which he has had all the trouble and all the anxiety and
all the expense of raising. Yes, just as that man has got that son
raised at last, and ready to go to work and begin to do suthin’ for HIM
and give him a rest, the law up and goes for him. And they call THAT
govment! That ain’t all, nuther. The law backs that old Judge Thatcher
up and helps him to keep me out o’ my property. Here’s what the law
does: The law takes a man worth six thousand dollars and up’ards, and
jams him into an old trap of a cabin like this, and lets him go round in
clothes that ain’t fitten for a hog. They call that govment! A man can’t
get his rights in a govment like this. Sometimes I’ve a mighty notion to
just leave the country for good and all. Yes, and I TOLD ’em so; I told
old Thatcher so to his face. Lots of ’em heard me, and can tell what I
said. Says I, for two cents I’d leave the blamed country and never come
a-near it agin. Them’s the very words. “Sounds kind of familiar, doesn’t it?

> It’s all too easy to imagine Democrats having no evidence even if there were plenty of hanky-panky going on.

Ah, I see. Sure, I agree with you, it could be happening without leaving compelling evidence.

Lori

If you dare, you can see the original at the Free Republic.

Noooooo. Don’t get out of the boat.

Seriously, Free Republic is ugly. If you’re not familiar with the Freepers style of “discourse” and you haven’t already had a heavy dose of fortifying caffeine this AM, and/or you would like to retain a shred of faith in your fellow humans I’d recommend against wondering over there. Sometimes it really is best to just stay in the boat.

WalterC

I think the whole “If my guy loses the election, I’m moving to Canada/UK/France” flounce doesn’t work as well for conservatives. Considering how far their partisans have shifted to the right, you could easily argue that Canadian or British conservatives would be considered radical Bolsheviks if they were here. From their perspective, the US adopting the culture and laws of the UK would be far worse than anything Obama would do even if he implemented every proposed policy he has come up with so far today.

Tricksterson

Come on aunursa, be a mensch and face the music!

Tricksterson

And once again you have a bunch of right wingers pleading to join a country which has gun control, gay marriage (or at least civil unions) and a national health care system. Are they really that fucking ignorant?

Carstonio

Sounds kind of familiar, doesn’t it?

Yes, and the rest of the rant about a free black man is even more revealing. The whole rant is redolent with misplaced entitlement. Almost like Twain could foresee the Southern Strategy approach to politics.

Carstonio

In my experience, the vast majority of people I’ve heard use that flounce over the years have been on the left side. I haven’t heard any on the right side use it this week, and you’re right that it would be very strange. I remember when the caning punishment in Singapore was in the news, and some rightists here said that nation had the right idea. Not much different from the Monty Python riff about reactionaries among average UK citizens wanting Ian smith in charge of their country.

D9000

Pap Finn would fit right in at Free Republic, except he wasn’t much for religion.

WalterC

Yeah, I know. It works with leftists (it’s still kind of silly and childish) because at least theoretically the Canadian system or the UK system is closer to what they want than Bush was, or Romney would have been. But if you’re a right-winger, it’s going to be hard to find a government that leans further right than the US in the UK or Canada.

Oh, and as far as “I haven’t heard any on the right side use it this week”, I’m having a hard time viewing the plea to the Queen of England to take the US back by conservatives at the Free Republic as anything other than an especially creative version of that flounce. OK, sure they’re not literally saying that they are moving to the UK, but they’re saying that being part of the UK would be better for them than living under Barack Obama’s Stalinist regime.

Now that you mention it, I suppose a Freeper link ought to have come with a more explicit warning, like we do for TV Tropes (which will ruin your life), but the threat is of a completely different nature, of course.

I think it’s more typical for conservatives to flounce in place so to speak, by saying that they’re going to move to some sparsely populated corner of the country and go Galt or full-on survivalist. I saw one hysterical winger going on about renting or selling the house and bartering for goats. Because obviously the current president winning a 2nd term means that you need to obtain goats immediately, if not sooner.

Lori

Oh’ and then there will be calls for another stimulus only this time
I’m quitting my job and will sit on my ass for two years if it’s
offered.

I sometimes forget how terrible ill-informed and stupid Freepers are about really basic things.

Dear Freeper,

Word to the wise: it will not be offered. You can’t collect unemployment if you quit your job, food stamps have no cash component and it’s very difficult to receive the kind of public assistance that does involve cash.

So go on ahead and quit your job, but plan on parking that ass of yours on someone else’s sofa or under a bridge because the free ride you envy those lucky ducky poor people for getting is pretty damn bumpy.

Yours,

A Member of the Reality Based Community

Tricksterson

Well, now that gay marriage is getting more respectable goats will be at a premium dince, as all coservative bloogers seem to believe, goat marriage is the next logical step.

Aides to Romney said they were optimistic he would be receptive to a sincere offer from the president to work together

I’m sure that someone has already said this (and better) before me, but . . .

What?!?

Wow, I’m sure that Barack is on the phone right now to the former governor of Massachusetts who couldn’t even win the state he used to be governor of and whose main claim to fame is founding a company that encourages (I possibly dare even say “forces”) its subsidiaries to drown in debt.